Emic Understandings of Attentiveness and its Related Concepts among American Students:A Comparison with Those among Japanese Students

Abstract

Emic understandings of attentiveness (briefl y defi ned as a demonstrator’s pre-emptive response to a recipient’s verbal/non-verbal cues or situations surrounding a recipient and a demonstrator,which takes the form of off ering), and its related concepts, namely, empathy and anticipatory inference, among Japanese have been investigated cross-generationally (Fukushima 2016).Building on Fukushima (2016), American data is elicited in this study, and a cross-cultural comparison of emic understandings of attentiveness and its related concepts between American and Japanese participants is made. The data is drawn from metapragmatic interviews in which the participants were asked to outline their understandings of the three notions above. The results show that overall there were not many diff erences in terms of the understanding of the three notions between American and Japanese participants overall. That is, both groups see the three notions as important in general. This may suggest that moral order on which both groups evaluate im/politeness does not diff er greatly.